Caesar Rodney

Caesar Rodney (October 7, 1728 – June 26, 1784) was one of Delaware's most consequential founding figures: a soldier, jurist, legislator, and statesman whose 55-year life was marked by an extraordinary range of public service. He was an officer of the Delaware militia during the French and Indian War and the American Revolutionary War, a Continental Congressman from Delaware, a signer of the Continental Association and Declaration of Independence, and president of Delaware during most of the American Revolution. Best remembered today for an all-night horseback ride through a thunderstorm to cast the deciding vote for American independence, Rodney left a legacy that is woven deeply into the identity of the First State.

Early Life and Family

Caesar Rodney was born near Dover on October 7, 1728, on the family plantation known as "Byfield," the eldest child of Caesar and Elizabeth Crawford Rodney. Byfield was originally settled in the early 1680s by Caesar Rodney's maternal grandfather, Daniel Jones, and after Jones' death it became the family seat for three generations of the Rodney family. Caesar's grandfather, William Rodney, emigrated to this country in 1681–82, along with William Penn, and was living at Murderkill Hundred, Kent County Delaware, in 1693.

Caesar's mother, Elizabeth Crawford, was the daughter of an Anglican minister, the Reverend Thomas Crawford, who was born in Scotland and was the first missionary sent to Dover, Delaware by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Caesar was the eldest of eight children, and at seventeen — when his father died — he assumed the responsibility of caring for his mother and siblings and managing the Byfield plantation.

Caesar was educated at the Latin School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After his father died in 1745, he was placed under the guardianship of Nicholas Ridgely, a prominent citizen of Dover, Delaware. Despite these early hardships, Rodney matured quickly into public life. His brother Thomas described him as possessing a "great fund of wit and humor," and he was broadly admired in Kent County social circles. No portrait of Caesar Rodney exists. We know that he was tormented throughout his life by asthma, and that his adult years were plagued by a facial cancer. He experienced expensive, painful, and futile medical treatments on the cancer. Caesar never married and left no children.

Early Political Career

At age twenty-seven in 1755, he was elected sheriff of Kent County and served the maximum three years allowed. This was a powerful and financially rewarding position, in that it supervised elections and chose the grand jurors who set the county tax rate. From that first office, a rapid succession of appointments followed. He served as justice of the peace, judge of all lower courts, captain in the Kent County Militia in 1756, superintendent of the printing of Delaware currency in 1759, member of the state assembly from 1762 to 1769, superintendent of the loan office in 1769, and associate justice of the Delaware Supreme Court from 1769 to 1777.

In his brief life he held more public offices than any other Delawarean before or since. He was a soldier, a judge, a delegate to the American Continental Congress, speaker of the Delaware Assembly, a chief executive of Delaware, a justice of the state's Supreme Court, and held many other offices of public trust.

Delaware in this era was politically divided, and Rodney navigated those divisions with care. Eighteenth-century Delaware was politically divided into loose factions known as the "Court Party" and the "Country Party." The majority Court Party was generally Anglican, strongest in Kent and Sussex Counties, worked well with the colonial proprietary government, and was in favor of reconciliation with the British government. The minority Country Party was largely Ulster-Scot, centered in New Castle County, and quickly advocated independence from the British. In spite of being members of the Anglican Kent County gentry, Rodney and his brother Thomas increasingly aligned themselves with the Country Party, a distinct minority in Kent County. As such, he generally worked in partnership with Thomas McKean from New Castle County and in opposition to George Read.

Rodney joined McKean as a delegate to the Stamp Act Congress in 1765 and was a leader of the Delaware Committee of Correspondence. This participation in the Stamp Act Congress set the trajectory of his commitment to colonial rights. Caesar was part of the Delaware delegation to the Stamp Act Congress in New York and wrote to his brother to inform him that the congress in New York would not conclude before the end of the Delaware Assembly session, in which Caesar was also involved. The letter is dated October 7, 1765.

The Ride to Philadelphia and the Vote for Independence

The event for which Caesar Rodney is most celebrated took place in the early hours of July 2, 1776. One of Delaware's three delegates to the Continental Congress, Rodney had been away in Delaware when he got word of the impending vote on the resolution for independence. Hurrying back to Philadelphia on horseback, he arrived in time to break the tie in his delegation and cast Delaware's deciding vote for independence.

Rodney had been away from Congress because his role as a Brigadier General in the Delaware militia had forced him back to Delaware to squelch a Loyalist riot. McKean got word to Rodney that his vote for independence was desperately needed in Congress. All night, as the first of July 1776, turned into the second, Rodney rode through a thunderstorm. He covered 80 miles and arrived at Independence Hall's doorstep in time to cast his decisive vote. Years later Thomas McKean remembered meeting Rodney at the door "in his boots and spurs."

The statue to Caesar Rodney showed him on his now famous ride to break the tie between the members of Delaware's delegation to the Second Continental Congress. Rodney's eighty-mile ride from Dover to Philadelphia to cast the vote signaled Delaware's resistance to British oppression and the state's dedication to Independence.

Despite the large loyalist population in his district, Rodney voted for Delaware to sever all ties with England in the State Assembly and shortly thereafter voted for independence in the Continental Congress. The political consequences were significant: subsequently, Rodney was neither elected to be a delegate at the Delaware Constitutional Convention nor the Continental Congress. Kent County voters punished him for his stand, yet Rodney remained steadfast in his commitment to the patriot cause.

Military Service and the Presidency of Delaware

Even as he pursued his legislative duties, Rodney took on a substantial military role. He was commissioned Brigadier-General during the Revolution and given responsibility for commanding the Delaware Militia. During the Revolution, he was a Brigadier General and later a Major General in the Delaware Militia. He served in the New Jersey area during this time, and was responsible for producing the required Delaware troops to General George Washington. As a member of the Council of Safety, he was unable to secure the Council's timely response to troop equipment needs and bought the necessary items from his own pocket. This effort resulted in many letters to Caesar Rodney from George Washington lauding his work. Correspondence indicates that these two men were well-known to each other and shared a mutual respect and regard.

Delaware's Second General Assembly in 1778 was far more sympathetic to the revolutionary cause, and they voted twenty-four to twenty to make Rodney the fourth President of Delaware. He spent much of his time fighting Tory insurrection in the state and dealing with the issues surrounding the Revolutionary War, including supplying soldiers to the Continental Army. During the Revolutionary War, Caesar Rodney served as the President of Colonial Delaware from 1778 to 1781. It was during this time that Thomas McKean and John Dickinson, two other notable Delawareans, reached out to him for assistance, including requesting help in guarding 64 British prisoners from a captured ship in July 1779.

He retired from the presidency after the war concluded, serving one additional term in the State Senate. Following his term as President of Delaware, Rodney, along with his brother Colonel Thomas Rodney, served as Delaware's Representative to the Continental Congress. During this period, Caesar Rodney fell ill and wrote to his brother Thomas, essentially requesting transportation back to Delaware.

Legacy and Memorialization

Caesar Rodney died at age fifty-six at his home near Dover on June 26, 1784, and was buried at Poplar Grove, his home on the Byfield plantation. In the years after his heroic vote for independence, he truly became the First Citizen of Delaware with his tireless efforts on the state's behalf. Indeed, this selfless service likely hastened his death. His burial site has itself become a subject of historical debate: while there is a marker that appears to be a gravestone for Caesar Rodney at Christ Episcopal Church, this is merely a monument. Many sources cite that he is buried there; however, most Delaware historians believe that the remains of one of Rodney's unidentified relatives are buried there instead. Rodney actually is buried in an unmarked grave in his family's unmarked plot on their former 800-acre farm east of Dover Air Force Base.

Rodney's memory has been honored in a variety of forms across the centuries. In 1934, a statue of Rodney was placed in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol. A large equestrian statue of Caesar Rodney, memorializing his famous ride, looms over Rodney Square in downtown Wilmington, Delaware, and his image on horseback appears on the U.S. Delaware state silver quarter, a state series begun in 2000. In Washington, D.C., near the Washington Monument, there is a memorial park and lagoon honoring the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and one of the 56 granite blocks there bears the name of Caesar Rodney.

The Caesar Rodney School District carries his name, as does Caesar Rodney High School. In 1916 a new school for area youth was constructed. Named to honor Delaware's patriot hero, the first Caesar Rodney High School was located on Camden-Wyoming Avenue. It was replaced by the present structure in 1967.

Rodney's legacy has also been subject to reassessment in recent decades. Tumult surrounding race in the United States and Rodney's ownership of some two hundred enslaved people on the plantation just south of Dover named Byfield caused city officials to place his statue in storage amidst further discussion on the issue of race. Like Thomas Jefferson, Rodney's ownership of enslaved people has tarnished what would otherwise be a great legacy to Delaware and the nation. Unlike Jefferson, Rodney's will called for the immediate emancipation of some of his enslaved people and the eventual emancipation of the rest. Rodney opposed the importation of slaves but he never seemed to question the institution itself. The Caesar Rodney statue in Rodney Square, Wilmington, Delaware, was removed in 2020.

In popular culture, Caesar Rodney appears in the Broadway musical 1776 and its film adaptation. He is portrayed as an elderly man suffering severely from facial cancer, and he has to be taken home by fellow Delaware delegate Thomas McKean. Later, John Adams sends McKean back to Delaware to bring back Rodney to break the deadlock over independence between pro-independence McKean and anti-independence George Read.

The correspondences between Caesar Rodney and his brother paint a portrait of a man deeply involved in public affairs, who had a national perspective but also took action at the local level. His ride, his vote, and his unflinching service to Delaware during the most turbulent years of the nation's founding ensure that his name remains central to any account of Delaware history.